Mobile Computing is Hot in the Enterprise, New Survey Finds

Organizations are just now beginning to develop and integrate mobile applications with back-end data sources. However, many of the issues associated with this integration outside of traditional application management such as security and lifecycle management are not yet well known.

These are the findings of a new survey of 537 data center managers, conducted among the members of the SHARE users group and GUIDE SHARE EUROPE, as well as subscribers to IBM Systems Magazine, Mainframe edition. The survey, which was fielded during November and December of 2012, was sponsored by IBM and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc. in partnership with SHARE, GUIDE SHARE EUROPE and IBM Systems Magazine, Mainframe edition.

The study finds most organizations provide mobile devices, support BYOD and reimburse users for mobile device use. Apple and Google smart phones and tablets are heavily used (especially tablets) although the Blackberry smart phone is the most widely used.

Enterprise mobile application access is in an early stage of development as most users cited email, VPN, and text messaging as their most important applications. Business intelligence and CRM application were cited as the second most important mobile applications.

The majority (34%) of the organizations indicate that they have between 1–25 developers working on mobile application development, and budgets for application software development range widely. Windows is the primary mobile application development environment, followed by Unix/Linux. Browser-based access is the primary mobile application delivery model.

Security, especially user authentication and back-end data access, was of significant concern to many organizations and cited as having the most impact on IT departments, the survey also finds. Nearly half of the respondents indicate that their organization supply mobile application encryption.